


That's Why We Call You Breezy

by ScooterSister



Category: Grand Theft Auto V
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dysfunctional Family, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Teen Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-20
Updated: 2015-07-20
Packaged: 2018-04-10 08:14:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4384172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScooterSister/pseuds/ScooterSister
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set in an AU in which Michael has another daughter who breaks up the vapidity and shallowness in the family while carrying on one of his worst attributes: his temper.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That's Why We Call You Breezy

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, guys. I needed a breakski from life in general and also a way to get the wheels turning for my main fic, so I decided to write this. I don't know if you'd call them drabbles and I don't even know if I'll keep it a one-shot, but I'm mostly doing it as a character work exercise. I hope that you don't hate the absolute shit out of it since I'm deviating from the main canon pretty steeply and throwing quite a kink into it, but here goes nothing. Let me know your thoughts. Love you all.

For a couple of months, there was an enormous billboard on Vinewood Boulevard extolling the virtue of hair replacement for men suffering from the agony of male-pattern baldness. It showed an elderly white woman gaping in appalment at the accompanying tagline "Blame your mother." The implication was that since hair patterns were commonly associated with matrilineal heritage, that these miserable men suffering from body dysmorphia brought on by hair loss should look to their mothers to answer for it.

Sabrina De Santa- as she was now expected to introduce herself- didn't know how much truth there was to that bit of genetic "wisdom," but the billboard resonated with her for another reason. She had a head full of wild, kinky brunette waves that started around her ears and that had most assuredly come from her mother. And while nobody on her block was likely to have noticed that Michael and Amanda both had straight hair and that her younger half-sister, Tracey, was adorned with pin-straight flaxen locks and that Jimmy's cherub curls barely registered (and were mostly a result of his sporadic washing habits), she always felt like she was wearing a big badge on her school uniform's lapel. A badge that said _"here be an outcast."_

Today was a day like most any other since they'd relocated to the big-concrete playground by the sea. _Los Santos._ It had been a hard sell for both her and Amanda, but where Amanda had acclimated quickly to the shallowness and absurd displays of wealth, Sabrina was having a tougher go of it. Listening to her peers drone on about the luxury cars that their daddies were going to buy them once they got their licenses or about the lavish summer camps that they were going to go see...Well, seven months ago, she wouldn't have imagined that these would be frequent or even _polite_ topics of conversation. The only thing that hadn't changed from her former group of peers was her constant push back against those that attempted to slap her with the nickname _Brie._ No, she wouldn't let that happen. She was not a _Brie._ To her family, she was Breezy, which was barely tolerable, but it wasn't _Brie. Brie_ was the name of conventionally attractive girls who didn't wear big, stupid glasses, who didn't have to fight their hair each morning, and who didn't have to see the guidance counselor about their waking nightmares about space invaders.

Back in Ludendorff, she'd been bracing herself for her freshman year by educating herself on the ins and outs of skanky weed and even skankier beer. She'd even let that kid, Spike Eagleman, feel her up over her sweater so that she could get used to being pawed at if and when she accepted an invitation to a graveyard party some idle Friday evening. The very graveyard where her father's fake burial had been staged.

She walked up the grade of the driveway to their house, a brick driveway without a single bit of masonry out of place. She pulled her keys out of the front pocket of her backpack and opened the door. She wasn't even in the doorway before she heard the yelling. It was becoming more and more common these days. That cacophonous jumble of Amanda's and her dad's angry voices. Jimmy was probably across the street at the neighbor boy's playing video games. Tracey was most certainly at her after-school cheer leading clinic.

Sabrina tossed her backpack onto the couch in the veranda and followed the voices into the kitchen. She leaned against the doorway to look at the scene before her. Michael was probably at least three glasses of whiskey in by now. Amanda was wearing that stupid tennis outfit. It was almost garish in how white-bread it was.

"Michael, how in the _hell_ do you expect for us to pass as standard L.S. stock if you won't even go to a single dinner party?" Amanda chided.

Michael swirled whiskey around his glass, not looking up to meet her eyes, his mouth pressed into that line that said that he was doing everything he could not to scream at his wife. "Amanda," he said with faux civility. "If I never have to listen to that Hayden _Douche-bose_ prick prattle on about his new wife's ass implants, it'll be too soon." Sabrina felt her face twist up into a gleeful smile at the potshot.

Amanda threw her arms up in defeat and stormed out to the back patio without a single word. "Fuckin' Christ," Michael muttered, taking another sip of his whiskey before slamming the glass onto the counter. He looked up at Sabrina then, raising his eyebrows pleasantly. "Hey, baby. How long you been standing there?"

Sabrina shrugged slyly, trying to suppress her smile at his obvious embarrassment. "Long enough." She shoved her body off the doorway and walked to the counter, leaning her entire body up against it in your typical show of teenage malaise. "Do we have to go to dinner at the Dubose house again?" she asked flatly.

Things were usually easier in these moments with Michael than they were with Amanda. There was a little more ease-of-access with him. Maybe because he was her actual flesh and blood. But he seemed to get that he had a passive ally in her much of the time. Except for when she was mad at him.

"Sunday night," he said with fake glee.

Sabrina straightened up and watched his face drop again. She cleared her throat and pulled out a slip of paper from the pocket of her school blazer. "I need you to sign this," she said, handing it to him.

He took the paper from her and studied it. "What is this?"

"A permission slip. Astronomy Club is going to Galileo Observatory next week."

Michael narrowed his eyes at the page. "They wanna keep you out 'til midnight?" he asked incredulously.

Sabrina immediately went into the defensive, which was happening more and more frequently the farther she got into this side of menarche. "It's springtime, dad. It doesn't get dark enough to look until ten and that's _without_ all the light pollution-"

He held his hand up with a harsh utterance of "ah," which told her to stop. She scoffed. He glared at her. "Easy, kid. We talked about this."

She gritted her teeth and huffed through her nose, mustering civility before her temper got away with her. "You're letting Tracey do the stupid cheerleader thingy-"

"That's during daylight hours-"

"She's being indoctrinated into a cult of brainless automotons with short skirts and she's still two years away from high school!" Sabrina protested. She gestured to the paper. "This actually has something to do with school, dad! It's science!"

Michael took another swig of whiskey and locked his stiffening jaw to the side, eyes still narrowed at her. She was exploiting the fact that he hadn't wanted Tracey in the cheer program to begin with. Amanda had won that battle. "I don't like it," he said in his typical swaggery slur. The one that made him sound like a wiseguy. 

Sabrina thought briefly about how to handle this. She stood up tall and stared at him hard before she started to back away from him slowly, turning on her heel and striding out of the kitchen. "Breezy bear!" he heard him call after her. She ignored him and rounded the corner to ascend the stairs. She made sure to make quite a show of slamming her door.

Forty five minutes later, she was out of her school uniform, dressed in a baggy white t-shirt and a different skirt. Pleated but black, not tartan like the stupid uniform. She was in the mirror, trying to wrangle her long, wild tresses into an elastic and having little success. The hair around her face wouldn't stay in the hair tie. She huffed out of her mouth like a bulldog with an under bite, blowing the hair out of and then back into her face. She shoved her big, tragically uncool tortise-shell glasses up her nose and stared at her face in the mirror. She looked at her eyes, her most distinctive feature owing to the fact that they were two different colors. One hazel, one blue eye. Acquired heterochromia. Acquired from a piece of debris from the trailer park explosion that had taken her mother from this earth.

She sat down at the seat in front of the vanity and leaned on her elbow, her incongruent eyes resting on the framed photo of her mother. It was a beautiful photo, taken well-before the advent of the digital camera. Taken with love by some love-sick fool. And now it was hers. In the photo, her mom, young and wild sits on the hood of a car with the wind of the Great Plains whipping her hair about, but not enough to obscure her face. This picture would have been taken around the time she'd met Michael and gotten knocked up. This would have been the woman that Michael had fallen for, if only for a minute. The woman that wouldn't sit still enough long enough for her to fall in love with him back. At least, that's what Sabrina figured. She earned the right to romanticize her mom by becoming motherless.

Her thoughts were disrupted by the sound of something under the door. She looked over to see something sliding under it. Something white and rumpled. She walked to the door just in time to see the shadow of the person on the other side rapidly disappear. She picked up the permission slip and saw Michael's script on the _parent/guardian_ line. She saw where he'd had to gracelessly turn what had started as a _T_ for _Townley_ into a _D_ for _De Santa,_ something that Sabrina herself continued to struggle with.

She smiled at her ill-gotten success but cried a little on the inside for how much she had begun to take Michael emotional hostage. How she'd begun treating him a bit like a marionette since they'd landed in San Andreas. Because she was a fish out of water, struggling for air in this place. It was a place where the anonymity suddenly felt cold and scary and the only thing that would wrestle down those feelings was a trip to the fucking observatory to look at the stars, which had blanketed many a cold winter's night in Ludendorff, but that you couldn't see from stupid, stupid Rockford Hills, Los Santos, San Andreas, America, planet Earth.

 


End file.
